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Shop Local Rewards is designed to create loyalty among shoppers in the local economy, with local businesses more than the larger, big-box corporations. The reason we do that is because it helps strengthen the local economy.

My mother owns Fashion Post in north Jackson and has owned it for 30 years. We were sitting at the dinner table, and she said was worried about competition from the big-box stores. There’s power in numbers with everything, whether it’s a school of fish or businesses. These businesses included in Shop Local Rewards are in competition with one another, but if they could look at each other as neighbors, that could help us compete with the larger, big-box corporations.

In order to help capture the neighbor-helping-neighbor concept, we set up tablets in each participating store at the front of the store near the cash registers. Customers have two choices: check in at a store or sign up. To sign up, they fill out six required fields. Once they’ve done that, they’re asked to take a keychain card and swipe it on the tablet. Once they sign in, they don’t have to sign in again.

Each merchant is an entry point to get people into the Shop Local Rewards network, and each business can tap into that customer network. You’re giving that card not only to your customer base but the customer base of the entire Shop Local Rewards network.

We’ve developed an app that allows you to do so much more beyond the keychain cards. You can see all participating businesses on a map and see all their rewards. The “Deals” feature lets merchants reach out to customers who aren’t part of their customer base. For every visit to a merchant, you get 10 points. When those points accumulate, you unlock rewards.

Starting a business is never easy, but coming up with a way to distinguish yourself from the competition, that was something challenging. My father is a co-owner. But we have different responsibilities. I’m on the technology side. He has the experience in putting together sales teams, operations teams. It’s definitely made a good relationship stronger.

A goal is to escape the home office to a storefront office. We’d like to saturate the local market and have a majority of local merchants in our network.